Here are some prophetic words.

"Our ability to come together to stop or limit damage to the world's environment will be perhaps the greatest test of how far we can act as a world community. No-one should under-estimate the imagination that will be required, nor the scientific effort, nor the unprecedented co-operation we shall have to show. We shall need statesmanship of a rare order.

"In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man's activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends.

"We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavours have brought peace to the Middle East. It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs.”

Those are not my words but Margaret Thatcher’s, given in a speech to the United Nations in November 1990. It was not the first time she had spoken on such matters. Through the 1980s she regularly lectured her supporters on such things at Conservative Party conferences. At that time environmental issues were not yet a political football for left and right; politicians on all sides recognised our collective need to protect our world, even if there was not yet the will to act.

Margaret Thatcher was also instrumental in convening the global conference that took action to ban CFCs, the toxic chemical that were causing a catastrophic breakdown of the ozone blanket that protects the Earth from deadly ultraviolet solar radiation.

Those politicians who have encouraged people to be ‘fed up with experts’ – on the economy, Brexit, the environment, pollution, food, air travel, carbon emission - should be ashamed. As we sit in our homes with the whole world in lockdown we can all now see where such hubris and folly leads.

For decades, just as medical experts have warned repeatedly of the dangers of viral pandemics, they have begged governments to take the rise of drug resistant infections seriously. They have explained that the growing rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria threatens the future of medicine and we will suddenly find the clock turned back 100 years and people dying once again of routine infections.

And hundreds of thousands of scientists (Margaret Thatcher included) have sought to persuade governments of the urgent need to act decisively to reduce carbon emissions, plastic pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. The response has been too slow because the cost of action has been deemed too high - and because some are ‘fed up with experts’.

Watching a microscopic virus wreak havoc across the globe, it is clear how much we depend on experts: doctors, nurses, and scientists.

If in these dark times we need more proof that experts are not killjoys peddling inconvenient truths then we can look at what is happening to the ozone hole.

Finally the ozone hole at the South Pole is healing itself. By acting together to ban chlorofluorocarbons, the world’s nations chose the right path. It has taken thirty years but together we have done something right and, in doing so, have demonstrated a number of home truths.

Firstly, we showed that human beings do indeed impact on the health of the entire planet.

Secondly, we have proved that we are capable of fixing our mistakes. That should lift all our hearts. Just as we are fixing the ozone hole so we can bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, we can develop new antibiotics, we can clear the plastic pollution in our seas, we can save the Great Barrier Reef, we can create a future without fossil fuels, we can protect our rainforests, we can live sustainably.

The coronavirus has already changed everything. York will not be the same again. By the time the virus is under control the way we work and shop and interact and travel will have changed forever.

Here in York and across our continent and our world, we can either shape our future, boldly and decisively, or be steamrollered by it. I trust that together we will choose the first option.